Product description

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He expected the one from his nightmare: the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming. The monster in his back garden, though, is something quite different. Something ancient; something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.

In this powerful novel about coming to terms with loss, Patrick Ness – the Costa Award-winning author of the Chaos Walking trilogy – spins a tale from the final idea of Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose early death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself. Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, it is a truly extraordinary work from two of our finest writers for young adults.

Product Details

Format

Hardback

ISBN

9781406311525

Accelerated Reader

AR book level: 4.8; Middle years; 5.0 points

Condition

Author/Illustrator

Bestselling and award-winning novelist Patrick Ness was born in Virginia, USA, and spent his upbringing in the states of Hawaii, Washington and California. He has lived in London since 1999. He is the author of a novel and short story collection for adults, but is best known for the Chaos Walking trilogy: The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men. The trilogy has won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Costa Children’s Book of the Year Prize, and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. In 2011 Monsters of Men won the prestigious Carnegie Medal after all three books in the trilogy were shortlisted, the first time that has ever happened.

A Monster Calls is Patrick’s sixth book, created from the final idea of 2009 Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose early death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself. In 2012 it became the first book ever to win both the Carnegie Medal and Kate Greenaway Award in the same year.

Jim Kay is the illustrator of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, which became the first book to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Award in 2012. In 2015, he illustrated a stunning new full colour edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Jim studied illustration and worked in the archives of the Tate Gallery and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, two experiences that heavily influence his work. His images for A Monster Calls use everything from beetles to bread boards to help create interesting marks and textures. He lives in Kettering, Northamptonshire.